Friday, February 3, 2017

TheHackerCIO recently took mandatory safety training at a Fortune-500 company. These are on-line presentations, with automatically scored answers. God forbid that you should score less than 80%! The punishment is to repeat the damn course! That's serious punishment.

No explanation is possible on a multiple-choice test. So, when faced with the question, "Which of these choices is correct," and having received a feedback score of "incorrect" for selecting that I should evacuate and that I should get as many coworkers as possible out with me, I could pretty well assume that the "correct"response was to keep my mouth shut and let them burn up.

If I had been able to add a written response as a "challenge" option, this ridiculous answer would have been corrected by one of the instructional designers. But no, no human interaction is allowed or desired. So the answer remains.

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

TheHackerCIO gets Job Descriptions (JDs) all the time that list a huge laundry list of skills, qualifications, desired experience, and job responsibilities. Many times no one in the world could possibly be a master of all these. Often, it is physically impossible to meet these supposed "requirements," because the technology hasn't been in existence that long. It specially irks me when I see the desire for a "Rockstar," such as you can see here (excerpt following, but the link has the details):

A word about titles: we are calling this job opening "Full-Stack PHP Web Developer", but we welcome applications from those who consider themselves any of the following: software engineer, software architect, web developer, programmer, hacker, coder, computer scientist, devops, "ninja", "rockstar", "wizard"... etc. We had to choose one title.

Usually, they say they are offering a "competitive" salary. But I don't know what that means. How about if I make a resume for you like that? I can say, for instance:

has a competitive understanding of a competitive number of technologies.

assumed a competitive level of responsibility and leadership.

competitive communications ability.

has a competitive level of interest in "working together as a team player."

That's what someone should expect if they want to offer a "competitive salary."

Then the phone screening can happen, we can imagine it...

Q: On a scale of 1-10, what is your skill with Java?
A: Competitive, like your salary.

Q: How many years of experience do you have with Cassandra?
A: a competitive number of years, like your salary.

Why do you think you can get a Rockstar at bargain basement prices? I don't think working for your company will be like doing a charity event, will it?!!!

You see, reciprocity is (or should be) mandatory. If companies can't hire people without demanding specific, concrete, numerical measures of experience, why do they think they can evade telling how many dollars they are willing to pay to get this experience?

Shouldn't they clearly offer a range of money? "In order to get the best candidates, and as an indicator of how serious we are about seeing truely Senior, hard-working, high quality applicants, who are in high-demand from other purchasers of their services ... we are offering in the range of $160,000 - $170,000 p.a. plus insurance, 4 weeks of paid vacation, etc."